Burning Questions (aka “No, I’m Not Fucking Up My Life.”)

A TwentySomething's 20 Questions From a Parent.

• Did we do a bad job of raising you? No.
• Are you acting out of some anger about your father and mine’s divorce? No.
• Why are you doing this to yourself? I’m not doing anything to myself. If anything, I’m giving myself an opportunity to be genuinely excited about something instead of being completely apathetic, which tends to be the state of mind I’m in more often than not. But you just see it as sarcasm and assume I actually care. In fact, that would be quite inaccurate.
• Is this because of what happened with *insert name here*? No.
• How can you survive on 13K a year? Not a fucking clue, but I guess we’ll find out now won’t we?
• Are you really going to live off of food stamps? That’s the plan.
• But it’s food stamps! Your point being?
• Where will you live? Don’t know yet, but that’s part of the fun of it!
• What are you running away from? Didn’t know I had to be running away from something to want to pick up and leave and try something new. I’m not so good at the stability thing - it's been made abundantly clear to me.
• When will you leave? August 13^th. They pay for me to fly out to Berkeley, then to Utah, then back to Berkeley. Schwee! And all I have to do is get on the plane and look pretty.
• I’m serious. Why are you doing this? Because I have no commitments, obligations, or reasons to not do it other than being poor. The way I see it, it’s better than playing with monopoly money which really belongs to the federal government that I will have to pay back the day I get a real job, which might never happen if I can avoid it because I hate structure and with this job, I get to make my own structure, which when you think about it, is a bit of a paradox, now don’t you think?
• What about school? It’s been around since 1831. I don’t think it’s going anywhere any time soon. I’ll finish my brilliant, made-up bullshit master’s when I get back. It’s all on me anyhow, so I’d rather be interested in the subject matter and classes I take and actually make an effort instead of showing up and forgetting about it until the day of. Which is pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last…oh….year.
  
• Is this because all your friends have moved around the world and you feel like you’ve been left behind? No. But they’ve been pretty good about making a niche for themselves wherever they go which means I should be okay. Stop worrying.
  
• But you’re going to be clear across the country! How can I not worry? It could be worse. I could be going to London or Thailand. Or back to Israel. Then you'd really worry.
  
• Won’t you miss us? It’s possible. But I never know what I want until well after the fact. So I’ll let you know after I’m there.
• When are you going to stop fucking up your life and start taking responsibility for your actions and realize you need to be an adult? Probably never. Isn’t life supposed to be about fucking up anyway? The more fuck ups I have now, maybe the less I’ll have later. Or less severe at any rate.
• You know San Francisco gets cold, right? That I do.
• You’re going to kill your grandparents when they hear about this. And after the year they had…do you want to do that to them? Well I certainly don’t want to be responsible for that. But they were young once too and they did things that people didn’t understand. My turn!
• Will you at least promise me one day you’ll settle down, marry a nice Jewish boy, and give me grandchildren? Haha. Hahahaha. Wait. Fuck. You were serious?
  
• I’m disappointed in you. I thought you were smarter than this. Why would you waste your talents on something that won’t even pay you well? Who needs money when we all end up in debt anyway?